Cutting-edge research for a better tomorrow: At Forschungszentrum Jülich, we seek answers to the big questions of the future, focusing on the socially relevant areas of information, energy, and bioeconomy. We are one of the largest research institutions in Europe and a founding member of the Helmholtz Association.
Our place among the leading research institutions is down to our outstanding employees, including around 3,000 scientists. Some of the brightest minds from more than 100 countries work on our campus in the heart of the Rhenish mining area between Aachen, Cologne, and Düsseldorf. We also welcome numerous visiting researchers from around the world each year.
We have colleagues who can look back on a long research career and those who have just left university. We all meet as equals and try to utilize each other’s talents to ensure that everyone feels like a valuable member of the team.
The scientific questions posed by our researchers span a range of topics and are often highly complex. It helps to approach such questions from different perspectives, which is why our working groups are always interdisciplinary and diverse in nature. Experienced researchers and talented early-career scientists from various disciplines work hand in hand at Jülich, united by a passion for science and a will to achieve scientific excellence. They contribute their own ideas, ambition, and skills to have a positive impact on the future through their work.
Our working groups thrive on diversity – as does our campus. It is an inspiring place where creativity can unfold. That is why the promotion of early-career scientists is very important to us. We want to get young people enthusiastic about science. Every year, around 1,000 doctoral researchers and several hundred trainees and students on placement start their careers with us. This helps us to ensure that there will always be top personnel conducting cutting-edge research in future.
Together, we look for solutions to the challenges of the future. Such challenges include how we can safely cover our energy needs using renewable sources or how we can achieve a resource-efficient economy. We work on these issues in Jülich as well as our branch offices in Germany and abroad. The relevance of our work and the excellence of our scientists is reflected in the numerous national and international prizes that have been awarded to Jülich – above all the Nobel Prize in Physics, which our colleague Peter Grünberg was awarded together with the French researcher Albert Fert in 2007.
In our work, we rely on large-scale equipment that counts among the most powerful in the world – from supercomputers to electron microscopes. This infrastructure makes our research centre a unique place for world-class science. As a large-scale research organization, we span across the entire spectrum of science: from basic research to the development of application-oriented innovations. Our aim is to help invent or improve products and thus make a concrete contribution to enhancing German economic performance. We want new knowledge to have an impact on society and make life better for everyone.
